So I discovered, somewhat at random, that six years ago I wrote a post talking about the word ramjollock and now Google has me ranked as the sixth hit, on the first page or results, for the word! It simply means “to shuffle cards.” Pretty weird that me talking about that word has made it so high in the results.
Today is Monday and SpiceCorps DFW is being held at our place tomorrow. I had to go to the office today and Dominica is in the office as well. She was up and in early, as usual. Morgan was over to watch the girls today. I had a really busy morning, several calls, so didn’t manage to leave home as early as I would have liked.
We are starting to get really busy in the office. We’ve been losing a lot of people. My small, “local” team has lost three people over the last several weeks. Two went off to work for different departments within the extended reaches of the company and one leaves next week for a career move up to Lansing, Michigan. Considering the entire team is only eight people to start with, that’s a 38% drop in staff in just a few weeks. We won’t feel the full impact of the losses for another week yet and then we will really get hit when the furloughs start in about a month. At that point we will drop to 50% staff or less for much of the remainder of the year. Doubling the workload while cutting pay obviously doesn’t go over super well. I’d say we are at a low point in morale since I’ve been there – which seems to actually be the point. Keeping us running with low morale actually seems to be intentional. I think that there is some misguided attempt to use attrition to cut the ranks with management forgetting that when you use attrition (other than retirement) to thin ranks that you are skimming the cream off and sending them to the competition and retaining only those unable or unmotivated to leave. The better and more necessary someone is, the more likely that they will leave. Which makes it actually start to be embarrassing to be left behind.
Went to the Local Diner for lunch today. Their tuna melt is just awesome.
After work we spent the evening working on getting the house cleaned up as much as possible. There won’t be a lot of time for that tomorrow.